Hard Marching Every Day: Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861-65

As a war correspondent, Wilbur Fisk was an amateur, yet his letters to the Montpelier
Green Mountain Freeman
comprise one of the finest collections of Civil War letters in existence. But Fisk was no novelist. He was a rural school teacher from Vermont, primarily self-educated, who enlisted in the Union Army simply because he believed he would regret it later if he didn’t. Between December 11, 1861, and July 26, 1865, Fisk wrote nearly 100 letters from the battlefield. At the beginning of the war he was exuberant and eager for contact with the enemy. Two years later, Fisk was disillusioned and war weary:
The rebel dead and ours lay thickly together, their thirst for blood forever quenched. Their bodies were swollen, black and hideously unnatural. Their eyes glared from their sockets, their tongues protruded from their mouths, and in almost every case, clots of blood and mangled flesh showed how they had died, and rendered a sight ghastly beyond description. I though I had become hardened to almost anything, but I cannot say I ever wish to see another sight like that I saw on the battle-field of Gettysburg . Unlike professional war correspondents, Private Fisk had no access to rank or headquarters. Instead, he wrote of life as a private - as one of the foot soldiers who slept in the mud and obeyed orders no matter how incomprehensible.